Archive for May, 2014
Wednesday, May 28th, 2014
In the preceding post, a nice discussion broke out about Kekulé’s 1872 model for benzene.[1] This model has become known as the oscillation hypothesis between two extreme forms of benzene (below). The discussion centered around the semantics of the term oscillation compared to vibration (a synonym or not?) and the timescale implied by each word. The original article is in german, but more significantly, obtainable only with difficulty. Thus I cannot access[1] the article directly since my university does not have the appropriate “back-number” subscription.‡ So it was with delight that I tracked down an English translation in a journal that I could easily access.[2] Here I discuss what I found (on pages 614-615, the translation does not have its own DOI).
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References
- A. Kekulé, "Ueber einige Condensationsproducte des Aldehyds", Justus Liebigs Annalen der Chemie, vol. 162, pp. 77-124, 1872. https://doi.org/10.1002/jlac.18721620110
- "Organic chemistry", Journal of the Chemical Society, vol. 25, pp. 605, 1872. https://doi.org/10.1039/js8722500605
Tags:Henry Armstrong, Kekule vibration, Paul Schleyer
Posted in Historical | 10 Comments »
Saturday, May 17th, 2014
I remember a time when tracking down a particular property of a specified molecule was an all day effort, spent in the central library (or further afield). Then came the likes of STN Online (~1980) and later Beilstein. But only if your institution had a subscription. Let me then cut to the chase: consider this URL: http://search.datacite.org/ui?q=InChIKey%3DLQPOSWKBQVCBKS-PGMHMLKASA-N The site is datacite, which collects metadata about cited data! Most of that data is open in the sense that it can be retrieved without a subscription (but see here that it is not always made easy to do so). So, the above is a search for cited data which contains the InChIkey LQPOSWKBQVCBKS-PGMHMLKASA-N. This produces the result:
This tells you who published the data (but oddly, its date is merely to the nearest year? It is beta software after all). The advanced equivalent of this search looks like this:
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Tags:beta software, generic data search, molecular search engines, search engine, search engine optimisation, search looks, software agents
Posted in Chemical IT | No Comments »
Monday, May 5th, 2014
My name is displayed pretty prominently on this blog, but it is not always easy to find out who the real person is behind many a blog. In science, I am troubled by such anonymity. Well, a new era is about to hit us. When you come across an Internet resource, or an opinion/review of some scientific topic, I argue here that you should immediately ask: “what is its provenance?”
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Tags:0000-0002-8635-8390, added value site, API, Internet resource, ORCiD, programmer, United Kingdom
Posted in Chemical IT | No Comments »